Rumspringa...My Tracy Anderson Transformation: Day 54: Starting to Prefer New Eating Habits, Say What?!?

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Day 54: Starting to Prefer New Eating Habits, Say What?!?

I mentioned how my hour of cardio the other day came as a lovely surprise...well, I was also worried it might have been a fluke. As usual, there was no need to worry! I did another hour of cardio consisting of 20 minutes bootcamp, 20 minutes meta, and rounding it off with 20 minutes on the rebounder! Gooooooo Me! You know they say, "variety is the spice of life"...well that's no joke. If Tracy ever wanted to throw out her "perfection is possible" motto in lieu of something else, "variety..." would be it! I mean, she even changes up her outfits on each new level for goodness sake. I just cannot imagine how anyone could keep up with a program that did not have this much variety with some new challenge to overcome, and something new to look forward to in the near future. It's like that feeling that comes at the beginning of a new exercise program is relived to some small degree every time you start a new level.

Also, my continuity arrived in the mail today! When I got it I thought, wow...this is real, I'm actually doing this. Incidentally I know many people have mentioned how their discs arrived late or were damaged. Thankfully, mine arrived 2 weeks after I placed the order, and in working condition...whew. It was so exciting to get a new cardio. The moves look fun and more dancey. Looking forward to it for sure, but I'm gonna save that puppy for when I officially begin Continuity. Some of the moves I previewed in muscular structure were crazy looking though. In one of the moves you are balancing on your hands, one leg, and your head! I feel like I'll be ready to join Cirque Du Soleil by the time I'm done with Continuity. The great thing was...I had no fear of failure. I was looking forward to trying new things, and getting better at them :)

As for eating, I am noticing that my body doesn't like being stuffed! For breakfast, I had half a sandwich and a cup of soup (just for reference, I would normally have 2 sandwiches and bowl of soup.) These days I usually start with a smaller amount of food, and then try to assess if I'm still hungry afterward and can then prepare more food if necessary. Well, after I ate I thought I might still be hungry (again this is a re-learning process so it really is hard to tell if I'm hungry or not). I got up from the table, got all the ingredients out of the fridge and realized to my surprise, I'm not hungry. I put everything back in the fridge and went to work knowing that when I was hungry again, I would have something tasty to eat.

Later in the day, I went to an all-vegan grocery store for the first time called Viva La Vegan Grocery. It was exciting! I picked up a handful of things that I had never tried before as they weren't in my regular healthfood store. Mostly fun junk food type things. Anyway, I got home and had small portions, but found they weren't filling. So I ate more and more and still didn't really feel full. I kind of came to realize over the course of the night, I didn't necessarily want these things in my fridge. New foods that are considered junk food are fun to try with a couple bites, but in the end I found they were not filling or satisfying in the way an actual meal would be. It was a nice realization that perhaps, and just maybe my desires for junkfood are no longer uncontrollable, ravenous cravings. It felt like that desire for balance that I'd wanted about being able to eat mostly healthfully, but still occassionally enjoy what I call "balance" food (others call "bad" food) for special occassions/social events, that maybe that could actually be a reality some day. The other night for example, my bf's dad offered to make us some delicious burritos for dinner. As I knew I was full, I simply enjoyed a bite of my bf's burrito, and I felt satisfied enough by that. I also smelled it a couple times, but the point is I got the experience out of it that I wanted. I got to taste it and smell it, and that was all I needed.

Don't get me wrong, I by no means have this eating thing figured out. But I'm learning new things without being hard on myself for not knowing them in the first place. As my TAM friend Michelle would say, I'm "failing forward". And the thing about failing forward, is that it no longer feels like failure...at that point, it's just called learning.

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What has Made This Time Different?

I have attempted to try to stick to an exercise routine so many times in my life, and yet I've rarely made it past a week or two at the most. This time has been a whole new experience, and this is a list of the reasons why (subject to change). Perhaps one or all of these will resonate with you too:

1) I have a simple, mental, visual analogy to help me focus on the bigger picture: In the past I've dieted and exercised and wondered why am I not losing weight? The key was that I wasn't consistent. The truth was that my efforts were sporadic rather than stacking one on top of the other. So it felt like I had exerted so much energy (which I had), but because it was not one foot in front of the other, my efforts did not stack up to any actual results. This made the most sense to me once I understood the the visual analogy of climbing a wall. My goal (lose weight/get fit) was to get over this wall. My attempts to get over the wall included climbing up (working out, dieting). However, I was constantly climbing back down the wall without realizing it (getting off the dieting, not exercising). Over time, I was exhausted from climbing up and didn't understand why I had not yet made it over, after all I had put in a lot of effort. It was then that I realized that every time I stop exercising, I am not picking up from where I left off the next time I start up again. Instead, I have to start from the very bottom of the wall. The steps up the wall do not help you climb over unless the are consistenly moving in a forward direction upward. While this may seem simple, and easy to understand intellectually, it was something I had to understand in the form of an epiphany. It was the first step to me being able to be consistent with my Tracy Anderson Method.

2) Make the goal about following through with the actions, rather than just focusing on the end results: Now that I understood that consistency was such an important factor in being successful with my goal, I had to figure out how to actually be consistent when I had never before been able to. It was so hard for me to imagine getting past level 1, because in my previous attempts I had learned how to do a few days of level 1, feel defeated, take a break, and then start over on level 1 again once I felt like I just couldn't take being overweight any more. My brain only understood how to stop and start over, so it just couldn't imagine what it felt like to move forward to L2-L9 and beyond. So, I made a commitment to myself that I did not even have to do the levels if I did not want to, but that I would play the videos every day as though I were doing them, just for the sake of my brain understanding what that would feel like. Amazingly enough, this triggered something in my brain so that it could at least entertain the possibility of experiencing the program beyond level 1.

3) Don't tell anyone I am learning to establish an exercise routine, until I'm on a roll. I understand using someone as an accountability buddy, and I do think that is helpful. But for me, I found that when I told people I was starting to exercise I diverted energy away from my goal (establish a regular exercise routine). So when I used to tell people, "oh I'm starting something new" people kindly wanted to know how it's going, how much I've lost, all these reasonable questions. For me, that added an extra pressure that I just didn't need. I didn't want to be accountable to anyone but myself, and I because I am someone who worries too much about what other people think, it just served me better to start the journey on my own and learn from my own experiences, learn to trust myself and my own instinct, and feel free to experiment without fearing judgements from others.

4) Don't make any changes to diet initially, but instead first focus on making exercise a regular part of my routine. Learning to exercise regularly and consistently & eating nutritiously are both lofty goals in and of themselves. To do both simultaneously has never ever worked for me. For my brain, my emotions, my inability to adapt to change, it was far too large an undertaking to attempt diet exercise simultaneously. For me, exercise is the easier place to start because it feels more in my control. There are only two choices (to exercise or not), and it is completely up to me, and not influenced by much else. On the other hand, food requires more preparation what with shopping, and storing and cooking, and taking food with me places. Exercise is just once a day whereas eating is something to work on multiple times throughout the day. Another thing is that if I attempted exercise and diet at the same time, if I did poorly in one area that day, it wiped out any good work I did in the other area (in my mind), and made me want to give up on BOTH. Exercise is the place to start for me.

5) Accept that my objectives are long-term and therefore no matter how hard I work, I will not be skinny in a month or two. But a year from now and for the rest of my life I will be.

6) Keep a blog or journal. For me, blogging has enabled me to see that some days are challenging, but there are also other days are easier. It is easy to forget the good days when I'm just focusing on the negative one at hand. Blogging allows me to go back and remember the positive things I've gained and learned along my journey.

7) Exercise with a buddy in the beginning to help make exercise a daily habit. While I didn't tell anyone about working out until about 2 weeks after I'd started, after that when I told my friend she was excited and wanted to try it out too. We exercised together for about two weeks, and that helped me establish a routine of exercising first thing in the morning consistenly.

8) Immerse myself in the success of others. I read others' blogs and success stories and facebook and the TA forum. www.masteringthemethod.com was such a great tool because it was the first visual I had to understand that this was going to be a journey and a process. It is so easy to see the "before" and "afters" and think that 1 week or a month of commiting will take me from before to after. Being able to see the "during" as well made such a difference to my brain because it was like the missing piece of the puzzle to understand this is not in any shape or form an overnight, overweek, or overmonth process. It showed me the bridge from "before" through "during" to "after".

9) Watch and re-watch and watch again Tracy's informercial and multiple visits to QVC. Especially the first month I watched them almost every day. Seeing the informercial is the pique of excitement in the beginning of a new exercise routine. Watching the infomercials help me remember the feelings I had in the beginnning and reminds me why I began this journey in the first place.

10) Trust Tracy, yourself, and those who have come before you, and have faith that while you can't imagine it today, each step you take will lead you to your after as it has for so many others.

11) Let go of being a perfectionist. Being a perfectionist prevented me from succeeding 100% of the other times I've attempted to exercise. It was vital to learn to only do whatever my personal abilites are and nothing more. Understanding and believing that I would build from wherever I was starting, as there is no need to exhaust myself physically and mentally by exercising beyond my capabilites was again instrumental. The very first time I tried metamorphosis, I was beyond defeated and in tears as there was no way I was gonna be able to do 40 reps of all the leg exercises as she did. I initially would pause the TV after every exercise attempting to complete 40 reps like Tracy was going. Helllllloooo, Tracy is in shape and she invented the method for goodness sake. I never exercised and was carrying around at least 50 pounds that didn't need to be there. Because I couldn't be "perfect" I thought I couldn't do the method. This was completely false. Finally, I figured out that I just had to do whatever reps I was able to do while she was doing the same exercise. Then when she moved on, I moved on to the next move. Suddenly my abilites were increasing, just by doing my personal best. It was the same thing with the cardio. It was important to me to play the whole tape, but that didn't mean I had to be jumping the whole time. Instead, I would step touch or march in place, drink some water. The point is that I got to experience what 30 minutes of cardio would feel like, and eventually be able to build up to it. I can now do an hour of cardio :)

...to be continued

Rumspringa...My Tracy Anderson Transformation

90 Day Metamorphosis with Tracy Anderson

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Day 54: Starting to Prefer New Eating Habits, Say What?!?

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